News and Events

Provost’s Teaching Awards 2015

The latest issue of ANTHROPOLITAN is available online

Publication date:
24 June 2015

The academic year 2014/15 has ended well for staff and students alike. It was certainly a very busy year during which two ERC-funded research groups commenced their preparatory research work in the department as part of a total number of 27 post-doctoral research staff. On the other hand, we were very sad to have to say goodbye to our esteemed colleague Dr Matthew Skinner, who joins his partner at the University of Kent, but have welcomed two new teaching staff, Dr Kimberly Chong and Dr Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic, who both joined us for a period of three years. We were also successful in appointing two new permanent lecturers, Dr Emily Woodhouse to Human Ecology and Dr María Martinón-Torres to Paleoanthropology. To our delight, our other Teaching Fellows are staying with us for a further academic year.

Figuring out the Future Emerging subjects and the flux of the economic present

Cosmologies of destiny: One-day workshop on the ethnography of predestination, temporality & freedom

Publication date:
26 May 2015

Start:
Jun 30, 2015 9:00:00 AM

What
does it mean to live a life that has already been written? How does one
understand the past and prepare for the future when superior forces mingle with
human agency? Distinctly from notions of fortune and coincidence, ‘destiny’
evokes conceptions of human lives and futures that are pre-determined: be it by
high political powers, cosmic forces, or transcendental entities.

The Subjectivity of the Body in Mental Health: An Anthropological Workshop

Publication date:
20 May 2015

Start:
May 28, 2015 10:00:00 AM
End:
May 29, 2015 4:00:00 PM

In recent years there has been a lot of
debate about subjectivities and mental health. The forming of the self through techniques
has subsequently given new angles on research of the formation of selves
through bodily and mental practices. Some of those studies, however, tend
towards a hidden essentialism – body and mind as the instruments that are used
to act upon an assumed self. On the other side of the spectrum, studies of
subjectivity assume that the subject is ephemeral, immaterial, a thing of the
law, language or the mind alone. If we do not challenge this assumption, we
might easily fall into the trap Foucault cautioned against when he called the
soul a prison of the body.

Research Associate Vacancy

Publication date:
12 May 2015

The successful candidate
will be a promising ethnomusicologist familiar with methods in comparative
ethnomusicology. The main focus of the post will be to make a comparison of the
music and musicking practices of egalitarian hunter-gatherers societies from
across the world, and publish the results. The primary research focus will be on
hunter-gatherers in Africa and South-East Asia.

London Anthropology Day 2015

Museums at the Crossroads

Publication date:
1 May 2015

Dr Haidy Geismar will give a public lecture on 17th May at "Museums at the Crossroads: Local Encounters, Global Knowledge," a new international summer institute focused on museums and the changing world.

Call for Papers - Anthropology in London Day 2015 Conference: Anthropology on the Move

Publication date:
25 February 2015

This year’s Anthropology in London conference invites paper and panel proposals that explore movement in the broadest sense, including movement of objects, people, ideas, cultural practices, and narratives; the structures, discourses, and practices that aid or obstruct such movements; the movement of bodies in dance, ritual, and performance; and anthropological theory and practice ‘on the move’, in step with a changing world. Core themes include, but are not limited to:

Serpentine
Galleries: An Evening on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Charlie, Secular Culture and Practical Wisdom

Publication date:
28 January 2015

According to many, the brutal attack on Charlie Hebdo has been an
aggression against the secular understood as the realm where freedom of speech
is not limited by religious or ideological constraints. In painting this
picture, commentators have evoked the Age of Reason. In a society based on the
values of the Enlightenment, it has been argued, humor should be un-restrained.
But, is this the case? Is the secular really a neutral sphere? And, should
Voltairean reason be the only guideline for satire in the West? A dose of
Anthropological sensibility can help us to contextualise and to answer these
questions.

Empowering Society with GNH - Gross National Happiness in Practice

Call For Papers. The War of Worlds: Self and Society in Social Movements

Publication date:
21 January 2015

This conference will be held on the 4th and 5th
of June 2015, in the Department of Anthropology at UCL.

H. G. Wells’ science-fiction classic, The
War of the Worlds, a parable of
nineteenth-century British imperialism, imagined southern England under deadly
and devastating attack from Mars: a threat personified entirely by a
technologically superior and brutal Martian ‘Other’. This two-day conference at
UCL, The War of Worlds, drops the definite article to explore relations of
domination and resistance in the twenty-first century. Today transnational corporate
cartels have brought formerly imperial relations of
domination ‘home’ to the West: as their sovereign populations are economically
abandoned, digitally surveilled, and opposition suppressed
through an increasingly militarized police. As a result we might begin to think
globally about the way perceived threats to architectures of domination once
personified by the ‘Other’, have turned to new threats posed by what Povinelli terms
the ‘otherwise’: alternative ways of being alive in the same territories which
propose that – in the words of the World Social Forum – ‘another world is
possible’.